Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

news.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 107 posts

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#51

Post by jessaustin »

snowwrestler wrote: post #33
jessaustin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This danger will be avoided in automobiles by making human control impossible as soon as that makes any sense. There will be no steering wheel, the front seat will face backwards to facilitate conversation, and accident rates will plummet. The thing that robocars can do, which roboplanes cannot, is slow down or stop completely when faced with vexing situations.

So how is the vexing situation resolved? Either the onboard computer must be able to manage 100% of all situations, or the human driver must have an option to take control to resolve it themselves. You can't have a car that makes human control impossible, and then gets itself into vexing situations. You'll be stuck there forever.

For nearly every mistake that human drivers make, a good way to prevent it is to slow down. Not every situation must be navigated at maximum speed. Robocars will be better drivers than humans, but slower will still be safer. I'm not talking about cars parked in the lane indefinitely because they're confused by some dirt obscuring the center line. If that had been a thing the Google cars would already have fixed it.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#52

Post by snowwrestler »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #45
sandworm101 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are "driverless" from an internal software or technology perspective. The car is making itself move. But they are not driverless from an external/legal view. There is still a person in there that is held responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle. When things go wrong, that person will still be answerable a the driver. I seriously doubt Google is sending out "drivers" without proper licenses. Equally, I c…

In context of this discussion we're evaluating the technical drivelessness, not legal one, so Google cars and the hours they logged qualify.

I disagree; I think sandworm nailed an essential issue.

At the top of this subthread, Zikes claimed that Google's cars are a "proven technology." Not even Google claims that now, and legality is indeed part of that.

Driverless elevators are an example of an actual proven technology. There's no human operator standing by to jump on the manual brake in case the automation fails. And if a driverless elevator does fail and causes harm, the elevator's manufacturer can be sued for damages.

Now, the idea of a "driverless" elevator seems like a silly name for just a regular elevator, but I chose that for a reason. Elevators used to have drivers, and people are already drawing the comparisons to cars:

http://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-dri...

Is Google willing to assume the same type of liability for their self-driving cars? Certainly not right now, so it's hard to call their technology fully proven.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#53

Post by bloaf »

snowwrestler wrote: post #48
bloaf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it impossible for a human to get a car permanently stuck? *edit: put another way, is it possible for a human driver to extricate a car from any situation?

Well the parent refers only to certain situations--those in which the robocar gets vexed and chooses to slow down or stop. I would expect humans to be able to resolve those types of situations, since we rarely find humans sitting in perfectly working cars on the side of the road just because they are vexed.

Ah, I see that you are referring to a scenario in which the vexation and stopping are not both products of some external stimulus (e.g. [1]) or malfunction but something else altogether. For example, parents who pull their perfectly working car to the side of the road to discipline their vexatious children. It certainly seems possible that a self-driving car might occasionally get itself into a situation requiring a reboot, but that seems like an awfully low price to pay for the convenience of autonomous driving.

[1] http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0811...

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#54

Post by rdtsc »

andrewray wrote: post #23

Cars seem fundamentally different than his other examples: Spacecraft, underwater vehicles, and airplanes. The importance difference is cars have a clear, visual grid of where they can travel and where they cannot travel. Painted lines on the road and navigational signs provide a construct of the environment around them. Maybe the closest comparison is subway / metro rails. There are already many fully automated subw…

> difference is cars have a clear, visual grid of where they can travel and where they cannot travel.

Visual grid for people to look at. All those cues and signs were not designed to be read and processed by robots. And there are crazy pedestrians, crazy drivers, maybe cattle crossing the street, an accident, ice, fog, ice and fog and cattle, unpaved roads, etc.

I would think an airplane's environment when in the air seems more predictable and stable, than an environment for car on the streets. Same thing for underwater vehicles. There might be crazy pranksters playing games with the vehicle 100 feet under water, but probably not a high probability.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#55

Post by agumonkey »

paulsutter wrote: post #44

While the article doesn't actually use the word "never", neither does it hedge and say "anytime soon". The central logic seems to be that humanity is starting from scratch building self driving cars, versus all the years of experience decades ago trying to automate spacecraft and submersibles. Oddly, I reach entirely the opposite conclusion. The article reminds us that even decades ago, with rudimentary computers, en…

Landing on the moon is to physics what car traffic is to chaos theory.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#56

Post by agumonkey »

aclissold wrote: post #40

On the topic of boredom and attention lapses while driving, I wonder if it would actually be made safer by being made more difficult, in contrast to the never-ending search for ease of use. Something that's difficult, mentally stimulating, and requires actual skill like a video game or musical instrument. Would there be more or less mistakes (collisions) if people were forced to be engaged 100% of the time in order t…

Taken to some extreme, people realized that safer roads, no trees on the sides, aren't that safer, they just make people lazier and keep crashing even when trees have been removed, faster.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#57

Post by sandworm101 »

hguant wrote: post #15
jessaustin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This danger will be avoided in automobiles by making human control impossible as soon as that makes any sense. There will be no steering wheel, the front seat will face backwards to facilitate conversation, and accident rates will plummet. The thing that robocars can do, which roboplanes cannot, is slow down or stop completely when faced with vexing situations.

Pulling over to the side of the road and putting your blinkers on is (almost) always an acceptable solution to an automotive error. Much harder to pull that off at 35,000 feet.

It's apples and oranges. Overshooting a turn at by a few seconds at 35,000 feet isn't the end of the world. Missing a turn in a car by even a quarter second means blood on the pavement.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#58

Post by sandworm101 »

jessaustin wrote: post #4
quanticle wrote: post #2

The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomous in nominal conditions that pilot skills atrophy, and then when the plane encounters adverse conditions, these de-skilled pilots simply do not respond correctly to the problem, crashing the plane. Specifically, I'm thinking of something like Air France Flight…

This danger will be avoided in automobiles by making human control impossible as soon as that makes any sense. There will be no steering wheel, the front seat will face backwards to facilitate conversation, and accident rates will plummet. The thing that robocars can do, which roboplanes cannot, is slow down or stop completely when faced with vexing situations.

Why assume that accident rates will drop in the all-autodrive scenario?

I haven't seen any such testing. I have seen many miles of google cars in amongst human-driven cars. I have yet to see any tests involving thousands of cars from a variety of manufacturers (and ages) all trying to drive together. To assume that the robots will cooperate perfectly, negating the needs for safety features ... wasn't there a movie about that? Big lizards in an autonomously-run park?

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#59

Post by paulsutter »

agumonkey wrote: post #55
paulsutter wrote: post #44

While the article doesn't actually use the word "never", neither does it hedge and say "anytime soon". The central logic seems to be that humanity is starting from scratch building self driving cars, versus all the years of experience decades ago trying to automate spacecraft and submersibles. Oddly, I reach entirely the opposite conclusion. The article reminds us that even decades ago, with rudimentary computers, en…

Landing on the moon is to physics what car traffic is to chaos theory.

True, but cars can already navigate traffic autonomously. And there is much more to landing men on the moon than physics.

Check out Tesla's live shipping code:

http://jalopnik.com/teslas-autopilot-system-is-awesome-and-c...

Are you predicting that cars will never be fully autonomous?

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#60

Post by agumonkey »

paulsutter wrote: post #59
agumonkey wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landing on the moon is to physics what car traffic is to chaos theory.

True, but cars can already navigate traffic autonomously. And there is much more to landing men on the moon than physics. Check out Tesla's live shipping code: http://jalopnik.com/teslas-autopilot-system-is-awesome-and-c... Are you predicting that cars will never be fully autonomous?

As a website commenter I'm not sure I should predict anything. To explain a bit more my previous message, as complex as going to the moon was, it seems a problem scientists knew how to define. One vehicle, 2 planets, the system is describable.

Traffic with lots of agents potentially interacting with every other agent, hence my chaos analogy, lots and lots of variable, ... is blurry.

There's successful research to describe multi agents collision avoidance but I've never seen it used on the field yet.

ps: reminds me airplanes vs car accident rates. Even if flying is inherently complex in itself, there's almost no traffic and almost no obstacle in air. Nobody would crash a car alone in the desert.

Post reply on HN